Technology Slice Blog

Elgin Park, Pennsylvania - I discovered the small (very small) town of “Elgin Park” the same way millions of others around the world have: someone forwarded me a link to a Flickr slide show. The subject line was “Cars of the past … real or models?” The photos were of models, all right, but they appeared so much more lifelike than any dioramas I’d seen before. I felt as if I was looking at a movie that was expressed in stills. I would soon learn that my view of Michael Paul Smith’s photos of this imaginary town was one of about 20 million — so far. I wrote about Mr. Smith and his scaled-down town for the Sunday Automobiles section. While this may seem like the story of a car enthusiast, Mr. Smith defies that label. He is an artist, not a car nut. He loves the aesthetics of American cars from decades past, but he doesn’t seem to care what engines they had. Elgin Park is really about a sense of home, not about the cars, which are simply the actors in the scenes. Mr. Smith is the casting ...